I learned to tune a guitar by ear. That method has served me pretty well.
Jimi Hendrix, he was a rock star. But he played guitar; I don't. I've just found ways to use words to make my mark in this history book.
It keeps me in touch with younger musicians who are constantly saying, 'Have you heard this new artist, or this new guitar player?' It keeps you reaching.
I suppose I am a frustrated musician so I annoy my family by playing guitar in the house. I used to be into acoustic stuff but my son Joseph is learning drums, so now I have an electric guitar and we play Metallica. We have an amp and a PA in the garage with his drum kit.
There will be some tracks on the next album which that will consist of mostly noise and feedback, whereas others may just have guitar parts and samples.
I only want to do what I really want to do; otherwise, I'm content to sit here and play my guitar all day.
The greatest guitar player in the world today for me is Paco de Lucia, who is actually Spanish.
I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.
When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that's how I learned to play the guitar.
There's no leader of this band, and there never will be. That's the key. You can't control how the public perceives you-people see rock'n'roll bands as the guitar player and the singer.
Unfortunately, most of the songs that I write I don't write them with guitar in mind. I just write it as a song and that was probably one of the ones that left an opening for it. The song's all right, I wouldn't choose to sing it now.
Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.
I was just learning to play guitar when Tracy Chapman came out. She wrote these songs, she played them by herself and I so admired her for that.
There have been times when I've feared for my own well-being in the great scheme of things because, historically, the track record has not been kind to the guitar players in this band.
I love to play guitar and hack around. I was in a band when I was in high school. I never learned to play very well, but I enjoyed it.
I've made my own music, and the way I've always described it is Peggy Lee with an electric guitar, or Billie Holiday with some PJ Harvey in there.
Every time the guys were knocked out by my guitar playing and the girls were knocked out by the type of songs I did. That set us apart from the average blues band.
I do not consider myself a guitar player. My father is a guitar player - I'm not.
There's just not a lot of guys around playing like that these days; a lot of steel players are plugging into stomp boxes, trying to sound like Jeff Beck on a steel guitar.
Peter was sick of being a pop star, the guitar god, and so he decided to teach himself other instruments. Among the instruments that he picked up was the mandolin.
I suppose my father was more influential in my starting to play the guitar.
My room is never clean. I play 'Guitar Hero' all the time and throw things around my room.
Back then, I didn't have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn't enough time.
There was nobody at the time who was playing slide guitar like Johnny, and nobody, or no white guys at least, that was playing country blues like that on the acoustic guitar. And it was at that point that I realized what Johnny had to offer.
If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.
I've looked at photographs of myself during concerts and it sometimes looks as if I'm in a fencing move, with a guitar in my hands instead of a sword.
I like to sing because my mother was a singer. She sang to me all the time, so I learned to love singing. I did have a career as little 10-year-old George Benson. I made my first record as a vocalist, but I've been playing guitar since I was 9.
My background in music is classical - I did graduate school in music. At that time, I was studying composition, but I was studying classical guitar very seriously.
When we moved back to the US, folk music was all the rage. So I traded in my banjo for a guitar.
You don't have to play a whole lot of guitar to be a good blues player. Some people plays too much guitar. Stack it on top of each other the way it don't - you're working too fast. Blues not supposed to be played fast. Blues supposed to be played slow. You could kill a man with just one chord.
During the 1970s and 1980s Gibson did use my likeness, but we never signed anything. This new Signature model is the first time we struck a formal written deal for a guitar with my name on it.
When I can focus on something like guitar or painting, I do. I started painting people I admire, like Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Nelson Algren, Marlon Brando, Patti Smith, my girl, my kids.
Bass guitar is the engine of the band.
That's pretty much why I went into show business because I wanted to have a guitar and sing unaccompanied, that was like my fantasy of the perfect life.
I played bass guitar in high school and in college and then I actually fractured my thumb, so my bass career went bye-bye.
I guess because I had such a horrible life growing up, going from place to place not knowing what I was gonna do and ending up being homeless, there was a lot of pain and a lot of anger that was coming out through my guitar playing.
